Aspetti funzionali e implementativi del Museo epigrafico digitale EpiCUM

Abstract

This work describes the main development activities of the EpiCUM project with particular reference to the implementation and functional aspects of the results achieved within it. EpiCUM aims to present and make available with a single digital museum the whole epigraphic corpus of the civic museum Castello Ursino di Catania, codified in EpiDoc.

The project stems from the collaboration between the Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies of the CNR and the Municipality of Catania and has gained the interest of the I.Sicily project and the involvement of the M.M. Lazarus of Catania with school-work alternation activities. The first phase of the project was mainly dedicated to the recognition of the epigraphs and to the preparation of the exhibition Voci di Pietra which proposes a selection of epigraphs according to innovative exposure methods through the intelligent use of technology and digital. The next phase focused on the analysis and coding in the open EpiDoc format of all the inscriptions of the civic museum and on the realization of the digital museum.

All information on epigraphs are encoded in EpiDoc within XML files and are easily accessible through the various sections of the digital museum in which they are presented in a simple and intuitive way, and visualized within epigraphic cards. The epigraphic cards provide access to the XML files containing the EpiDoc encodings. The epigraphic information can be appropriately queried through a section of the digital museum dedicated to searches. With this method of organizing epigraphic information in the digital museum, the whole epigraphic heritage of the civic museum of Catania can be used for various purposes, both for scholars in the sector, but also for all other types of possible users.

Notice that in order to facilitate the navigation through epigraphic information, it was decided to separately include also information about the religious sphere, the collections of provenance and the copy status of the epigraphs, encoding them within the XML files by means of a specially selected set of EpiDoc markup elements.